


Low Camera Angles

by epkitty



Category: Batman: The Animated Series
Genre: M/M, Pre-Slash, Present Tense, UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-28
Updated: 2011-02-28
Packaged: 2017-10-16 00:33:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/166545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epkitty/pseuds/epkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Early morning in the Batcave.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Low Camera Angles

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the Tarot card 04, The Emperor. The title for this story is inspired by another fic I read somewhere, which of course I don't remember now.

In the smallest hours of the morning, Bruce Wayne listens to jazz. The raw, dirty kind that his parents used to dance to in the living room with the ancient radio fuzzing in and out. The fast and jagged kind, with loose saxophones and lazy but staccato percussion tapping out a faithful, raunchy beat. The loud and clanging kind that clings to the eardrums in fits and swirls of horns and woodwinds, and the jarring pelt of piano.

Dick doesn’t mind the music so much, but he wishes Bruce would listen to something else.

The jazz doesn’t sit well with him, because it plays in the kitchen on Sunday mornings, and in the den on Thursday evenings, and it feels wrong, ricocheting through the Batcave, too expressive for Batman. Batman has nothing to do with this kind of emotion.

And it’s just too odd to see him, not one or the other, but a man in a superhero costume without a mask on, sipping tea from a china cup and tapping absently at the buttons of a supercomputer with a black-gloved hand. As the jazz rattles the night/morning gloaming that can’t be seen but only felt at four in the morning in the indefinable darkness of a bat-infested cave that smells like guano, mint, and astringent.

“Can’t we listen to something else?” As usual, Dick catches the whine in his tone only after the words are said and the plea reverberates his moan through the caves.

He takes Bruce’s silence as a no.

Dick is beginning to resent Bruce's particular brand of authority.

"I only thought the jazz was getting a little old…" he grumbled.

Bruce finally looks over to where Dick is scrubbing down the Batmobile. "You're wet."

"No shit," Dick says, throwing the oversized sponge in the bucket.

Bruce just sits there, looking at him.

"What?"

Bruce reaches out to the console. With barely a skip, the jazz transforms into the raucous, uncouth rock Dick has so recently taken a liking to.

"Thanks."

Bruce nods and looks away, as though determined to forget something.

= = = = =

The End


End file.
